CAN THE
PADRES WIN
YOU BACK?

Only thing half-full these days are seats at Petco Park

To those who look at the glass as half-full, Petco Park is half-full for Padres home games. To others, it’s not just half-empty, but more than half of the half-empty crowd at Petco is wearing either Giant orange or Dodger blue.

Smallish crowds are not a new phenomenon at Petco Park — Padres home attendance has dropped or stayed basically the same almost every year since its opening in 2004 — but many are the games now when you’d think the visiting team was home. To be sure, fans of other ballclubs know that even if they can’t get seats for their teams’ home games, there are always plenty available for road games in San Diego.

“We want people to buy tickets, and if people buy tickets from out of town and behave themselves, we’re fine with that,” said Ron Fowler, the Padres’ executive chairman. “Five years from now, we want 80-90 percent of the ballpark to be Padres fans on an every-game basis. But we have to earn that back.”

Ah, and there it is, that last line. The crux of the problem.

Obviously, the dynamics at Petco Park are a reflection of the fact that it hasn’t hosted a playoff game since 2006, the sub-.500 records in four of the past five Padres seasons and yet another slow start in 2013. But the source of alienation runs deeper than — or rather, well above — the playing field.

In the above statement about winning back San Diego, Fowler meant “we” in the franchise-wide sense of working to improve the on-field product, and he was right about that. But he also could’ve been saying “we” in reference to just himself and the new ownership group, brother pairs Kevin and Brian O’Malley and Peter and Tom Seidler.

Clearly, they’re not being given much of a honeymoon period. In more than one way, the new bosses are paying a price for the old bosses, the previous owners who disengaged from both the team and community, put a cheap and largely unsuccessful product on the field and walked away with some huge checks in their own wallets.

Following in the messy footsteps of John Moores and Jeff Moorad, too, the new owners didn’t help local perceptions when their first winter in San Diego passed and their fourth-place team remained virtually unchanged.

“I think there was the excitement of the new ownership at first, especially after the way the team performed at the end of last year,” said lifelong Padres fan David Hall, a local attorney who’s generally dissatisfied with the quality of the teams being fielded the past few years. “But now I think the Padres are at an extremely low ebb.”

Asked if he thought his was a minority opinion among Padres fans, Hall said, “I’m in the vast majority.”